


Things that haven't changed

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Series: Lipstick [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1930s, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes gets lipstick instead though so like, Dying Parents, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Other, Period Typical Attitudes, Period Typical Language, Platonic Kissing, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Queer Gen, Steve's got issues with imminent parental loss and also being frozen for ages, Trans Character, everyone is happy, except Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 14:52:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1652621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Back in your day, men were real men, huh, Cap?” Steve and Sam are at a store on the outskirts of Philadelphia stocking up on food in between leads on the Winter Soldier.<br/>“Huh?” Steve grunts at the man behind the counter, wishing the guy could just give him his damn chips and let him go.<br/>“None of this homo-transsexual crap,” The man gestures at a group of androgynous teenagers near the entrance to the store.<br/>“Uh,” He stammers, looking to Sam for guidance. “Sure.”<br/>He pays for their things and they leave, but by the time they're nearing the car, Steve feels like shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things that haven't changed

**Author's Note:**

> Featuring Bucky of ambiguous gender due to a number of reasons including "just because" and "vocabulary limited by 1930s".  
> Featuring Stucky of ambigious relationship because maybe there's a crush thing or maybe it's platonic but hey they're 14 and 16 so read it how you like but there's lipstick and kisses and it's like fluff without the hugs.  
> I didn't pronoun Bucky at all in this (unless I fucked up), so it might read kind of awkwardly, but we'll see how it goes, shall we?  
> Warnings for transphobic and homophobic language and references to (possibly queerphobic) child abuse/beating.

“Back in your day, men were real men, huh, Cap?” Steve and Sam are at a store on the outskirts of Philadelphia stocking up on food in between leads on the Winter Soldier.

“Huh?” Steve grunts at the man behind the counter, wishing the guy could just give him his damn chips and let him go.

“None of this homo-transsexual crap,” The man gestures at a group of androgynous teenagers near the entrance to the shop.

“Uh,” He stammers, looking to Sam for guidance. “Sure.”

He pays for their things and they leave, but by the time they're nearing the car, Steve feels like shit.

 

 

It's December 1932, and Steve Rogers is fourteen, and more than halfway to becoming an orphan. Sarah, his mother, is now in the very sanatorium where she'd worked all her adult life to support him. No treatment to speak of, not beyond general care and fresh air. She might not die if she doesn't work herself to death, if she takes small breaths, if she makes it long enough for a successful treatment to be found. If she does die, she might still have a few years left.

He could nurse her at home, he insisted.

She didn't want to be cared for by someone so close to her, she'd said. It hurt enough as it was.

But Steve isn't stupid, and Bucky can read it in the lines of his body at school the next day. She doesn't think he can do it. Doesn't think he's strong enough. Thinks he'll catch TB from her and end up in the next bed along. Never shake it. Thinks that if her son takes care of her whilst she's sick, he might not outlive her, and then she'd die knowing that kind of loss with the taste of mustard gas still bitter on the back of her tongue.

So Steve is alone a lot. She comes back sometimes, for a few days if she's doing particularly well, she was a nurse there after all, she's allowed out even though the walls around the sanatorium are high and the gate at the front is guarded. She often wears a mask, and she doesn't kiss him. No more lipstick smeared onto his forehead before she sends him off to Bucky's and goes out dancing with her friends. Not that she could afford to, these last few years. She holds him and he cries, because he's fourteen and there's no one but her and Bucky, but she never does give him a kiss. She's the only person who's ever kissed him, and he feels like the loneliness might actually kill him if he never gets that kiss again. He doesn't want to cry, wants her to think he's strong enough to make it so he can believe it himself, but he isn't. He's just not. He thinks a lot about the orphanage near the church, severe women dressed as God's penguins and bruised, hungry looking children who never seem older than about thirteen. He wonders what happens to the older ones, if they go to work at the docks or find some rich sponsor, or maybe they just disappear. 

Steve couldn't work at the docks and he knows it. His part time job won't keep him forever. He'd asked Bucky one day, and Bucky said the kids at the orphanage probably slept with old men for small change and Steve had laughed, because what middle aged man would pay _him?_

But Bucky is there, and Steve diligently continues attending school, forcing Bucky to actually turn up if only to avoid coming to blows with the teacher, and works a part time job besides. Often he comes home to the same emptiness in his chest, the only thing that can replace the perpetual asthmatic wheeze, but sometimes the door is ajar and dinner is already waiting, made by Bucky or by Bucky's mother and ferried by Steve's friend to his table. Those are the only nights he eats hot food, too tired to cook and too poor to afford anything worth eating.

 

It happens twice. The first time Steve thinks of as the revelation, and the second is Steve himself opening the flood gates. 

 

He comes back from work early, not enough customers so his boss decided to shut up for the evening, and Bucky is there, somewhere. There's food on the table, but no Bucky to speak of in the room.

The bathroom door doesn't have a lock, but he knocks on it to no reply. Steve's “room” is more of an alcove off the main room with a bed in it, and that only leaves his mother's. Worried and curious, he pushes the door open.

It creaks and Bucky startles, head snapping round, eyes wide. Lips bright red, backing away until shoulders meet wall with a thump that the neighbours will hear.

“What the hell are you doing?” Steve hisses in an attempt to ensure that they don't. No one can overhear this argument.

Bucky bumps into the dresser, head shaking, one hand clutching something and the other spread in apology. “Steve, I – I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I mean I didn't touch any of her clothes, just the lipstick, I only wanted to see – ”

Steve crosses the room and knocks the case from Bucky's hand and then grabs a fistful of dark brown hair. Bucky is taller than him, older and stronger and isn't asthmatic, but goes like a small child cowering under a mother's grip as Steve stalks them to the bathroom.

“Please! Please don't tell my Dad, you know he'll beat me half to death,” Bucky pleads. “I'm real sorry Steve, I never meant to upset you, please forgive –”

Steve forces Bucky's head down towards the sink and scrubs the lipstick off with soap and water, leaving Bucky's lips stained and swollen, and eyes filled with tears.

“For God's sake Bucky!” He shouts, not caring about neighbours now. “TB is spread by saliva! Saliva!”

He shakes Bucky around by the collar, who flops about like Steve's a dockworker, not a weedy teenager, tears running down onto Steve's hands.

He lets Bucky go, and Bucky tumbles back a step, dashing at the tears. “I'm sorry! I didn't know.”

Steve can't stand to see Bucky cry, never could stand to see people he cared about upset. He sighs and rests a hand on his best friend's shoulder. He needs to change the subject, he needs not to have this discussion with Bucky, not right now. “I know.” He sighs again, shaken. Like Bucky is. He brushes down the front of Bucky's rumpled shirt, smoothing out the creases where he'd twisted the fabric in his hands. “I'm sorry I got so het up about it. Let's just go eat, okay.”

Bucky follows him almost meekly, and begins serving up dinner without looking at him. “You won't tell?”

Steve shakes his head. “No one's gonna find out. Just... Don't do it again.” Bucky nods, they eat, and quickly they change the topic to something less demanding.

He does take Bucky for testing though, the next Saturday he has off work. Bucky's in the clear, for now.

 

That was four months ago, and they haven't talked about the lipstick episode since.

It's the tenth of March 1933, and Bucky is turning sixteen before Steve even turns fifteen. He has money, not much, but more than he's had in a long time, because his mother is being allowed to work two hours a day at the Sanatorium. He worries about her, her haggard face and a cough worse than his on a bad day, but the extra four dollars a week is more than a little relief. He took a Saturday off work and spent it with her at home, and Bucky's mom made extra food for dinner so that Bucky could bring it over in the evening and neither of them would have to cook.

Steve has work after school today from four till seven, and he serves customers with a slight twitch of excitement. It's childish, he knows, and maybe even selfish that he's taking advantage of his empty house for once; Bucky will come to his and they'll celebrate alone together. There will be dinner on Saturday at Bucky's, but tonight it's just them. Not that he's planning anything untoward, on the grander scale of things. Steve is almost as innocent as he looks. Almost. But he is a realist. 

When it's close to closing time and the store is mostly empty, he leaves his post to go and look around. This year's the first year he's had money to buy Bucky anything out of the last three, and there must be something in a store this big that Bucky would like.

He goes over to the pharmacy counter and then admonishes himself. What the hell would Bucky want from there? Toothpaste?Cough drops?

But then he sees it and he knows. Bright red, ten cents apiece, or fifteen with matching nail polish – **TODAY** **YOUR** **LIPSTICK** **MUST MATCH YOUR** **NAIL POLISH** , reads the poster behind Ann Willows, the only girl soda jerk Steve has ever known, with surprising urgency.

He knows Bucky likes nail polish, but he's also seen Bucky chewing off leftover bits of paint on a cuticle, anxious to avoid a beating, or worse. In fact, worrying at scraps of polish is the only reason he knows Bucky has ever worn any. Bucky has never said, and Steve doesn't think Bucky is aware that he knows at all.

So he buys them both, and some nail polish remover, guiltily confirming that they're all for his mother when Ann brings it up, and asks for an ice cream soda to go, with the promise that he'll bring the glass back tomorrow before returning to his own counter to sell himself some misshapen pastries for a discount.

By the time Ann hands him his soda, smiling kindly at Steve's awkward attempts to flirt, he's a half dollar lighter and a good deal more anxious.

He only lives two streets away, and by the time he gets back, Bucky is already there, feet up on the table drinking a beer stolen from Mr Barnes' “secret” stash.

“You'll get licks for that,” He says, but Bucky only laughs.

“Not on my birthday,” Bucky hopes aloud.

“Happy birthday, Buck,” Steve claps Bucky on the shoulder and sets the ice cream soda down on the table, taking a sip from it first just in case Bucky glugs it like the last soda on Earth. “What's it like being sixteen?”

“Not so different from being fifteen, but then you wouldn't know about that, would you?” Bucky teases, reaching over to take a large swallow of the soda and licking off the ice-cream foam moustache with that smug, charming grin. “Thanks.”

“I got you a present,” Steve says, immune to petty jibes these days, setting out plates and serving up the stew that Bucky's brought and heated, leftovers from the night before.

“Man, you know you don't have to do that,” Bucky admonishes him half heartedly, eating a pastry before their meal, because it's Bucky's birthday and today they can both eat in whatever order takes them. “You should be saving your dough. My family's okay, Dad's out raking in the good stuff when he's not out spending it on booze.”

Steve shrugs. “I know. But I had the money and I wanted to.”

Bucky smiles at him, sopping up the stew with a piece of day old bread. “Thanks. Punk.”

“You might not like it,” Steve suddenly wants to confess. “If you don't, I'll, I mean, don't be insulted or anything.”

He lays out the lipstick and the nail polish carefully on the table in front of Bucky and waits for a reaction. For a minute, Bucky says nothing, staring at the gifts without touching them, swallowing convulsively and blinking rapidly, food forgotten. “I – I...”

“I can take it back and swap it for something –” Steve begins, but Bucky cuts him off.

“No. No, I... I'll definitely get licks if Pop sees me with that.” Bucky blushes, head shaking but already uncapping the lipstick to examine it. “I don't know what to say, Steve.”

Steve hasn't time to worry that he's caused offence, because Bucky is already applying the colour, examining the line of it in the blade of a knife. It slides on smooth and red over Bucky's perfect pout, the strong colour stark against dark hair and glowing against flushed cheeks. There's a long moment of stunned silence as Bucky takes in what Steve has conspired to do, which Steve is compelled to end. “It's your colour.”

Bucky sniffs, eyes wet with tears that they'll both swear were hay fever if ever they're asked, though no one even knows what they're up to. “I want to see,” Bucky says and leads Steve into the bathroom.

The mirror is small, but it's big enough and Bucky cracks a smile that would give those flashy dames Steve sees on the richer side of town a run for their money. “How do I look?”

Steve grins, because even though he knows this is wrong, or he knows his priest and Bucky's Dad would certainly think so, he loves to see Bucky like this. “Good enough to kiss.”

Bucky blushes at the complement, giddy on excitement and the thrill of illicit behaviour.  “Oh yeah?”

A loaded question if ever there was one. It makes Steve's throat close up a little. “Yeah.”

Bucky turns to him, graceful and beautiful and in total disregard for his personal space. Steve thinks Bucky might kiss him on the mouth, but instead he feels Bucky's lips, warm and smooth with make-up plant firmly on his cheek.

He blushes beet red anyway, he knows from the heat in his face and from Bucky's grin, teasing but ultimately pleased. “Let's go eat.”

Steve turns to follow, but before he does he leans up to the mirror, and smiles at the smudged imprint of Bucky's lips on his cheek.

 

If he was worried that things would be awkward between them at the table, he needn't have been. He has to tell Bucky not to put shoes on the furniture, and Bucky experiments with whether or not it is acceptable to mop stew with an apricot pastry, and apparently it is, but Steve is willing to take someone else's word for it and to not try for himself. He's had enough new for one evening.

The hard part comes when it's time for Bucky to go home, and by extension, time to remove the lipstick and the nail polish that had been so carefully applied after dinner. Steve can see that Bucky doesn't want to, would keep both on forever if the world would just let it be.

They go back to the bathroom and Steve wets a cloth. Bucky takes it gingerly and gives Steve one more kiss, one that smells of beer and ice cream soda and makes the both blush, lower down on his neck, before wiping the lipstick away.

“Thanks, Pal,” Bucky tells him, looking more sincere than anyone Steve's ever seen.

“You wanna be a dame, Buck?” Steve asks. “I won't tell.”

Bucky shrugs, cheeks still dusted pink, scrubbing now at the nail polish with a piece of cotton wool. “Maybe. I don't know. Do you mind? If I'm a gal or a fruit?”

Steve smiles and shakes his head. “Some other dames might not welcome the competition, but I could never mind you, Buck.”

 

 

“So,” Sam asks teasingly as they each do up their seat belts. “ _Were_ the men all “real men” back in your day?” He gives Steve a look that suggests he already knows the answer.

Steve's hand ghosts over invisible lipstick kisses on his cheek and neck, before he puts his foot resolutely down on the accelerator.

“No.”

 


End file.
